A Window Upon Mountains

Forest and Bird, Volume 20, Issue 3, 1 August 1989, Page 42

A Window Upon Mountains

by

Peter Hooper

| n stillness, in quiet breathing, the dominance of the ego diminished, one can participate in the rhythms of natural being. A dewdrop flashing in the sunlight becomes a passion of jewelled energies, its extinction the death of a star. Yet as the wave of morning flows ever westward around the world, the tide of darkness daily strands fresh brilliants about our feet. Every morning is an invitation to new pastures of the imagination. I am fortunate that I live in a noble landscape, my windows opening upon valley farms to the blue-steeped wilderness of the eastern Paparoa ranges. Like the ocean a mountain range is never static; it flows to different rhythms, that’s all. Angles of sunlight, the passage of winddriven cloud shadows, the veiling of peaks by coming rain, are all phases which daily reveal the moods of a mountain range. The northward retreating sun of autumn shapes ridge and valley differently from their summer contours. In the sharp clarity of dissolving mists on a winter's morning the mountains advance almost to the end of the garden. And tomorrow a nor’ wester may see the same ridges turn their backs upon me as they shrug grumpily into an overcoat of cloud. Fortunate indeed are those who can re-

lease the imagination to participate in the holistic nature of wilderness. A communion is established and the mind liberated to its wanderings in lonelier and more remote valleys than the eye had reported. To keep the mind open to this sense of wonder is to come home to a wholeness of self that matches the wholeness of unspoiled nature. For me, this faculty of delighting in the natural world operates most powerfully during autumn, in late March and April. The conditions required are quite specific, and could be measured in terms of atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, the angle of the noonday sun, wind direction and speed. There is a quality of ambience in the light that gives mystery to the landscape even under the cloudless sky. Earth pauses in its breathing, caught in memory of past summer before the onset of winter. Wax-eyes fossick among the garden shrubs, sparrows rifle the seeding toe-toe, dusk sometimes floats the kotuku lordly above the marshes. A mountain wind on such days brings to the quiet roads and towns of the seashore the electric vitality of forested solitudes, the breath of the wilderness just beyond our backyards, the challenge of Emerson's ‘alienated majesty’ within ourselves.

The only equipment needed for a journey through current space and time into a natural state beyond the personal ego is a healthy pair of feet, preferably well shod. Hazlitt has some shrewd remarks On Going A Journey, by which he means walking: "I can enjoy society in a room; but out of doors, nature is company enough for me. I am then never less alone than when alone . . . | cannot see the wit of walking and talking at the same time. When I am in the country, I want to vegetate like the country." Even in England’s tamed countryside, Hazlitt reached out to enter into the spirit of nature. In Water and Dreams, the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, sees the world delighting in experiencing itself: "The cosmos, them, is in some way clearly touched by narcissism. The world wants to see itself: The lake is a large tranquil eye." Philosophically, one can accept that ecological holism makes possible a sharing of nature's self-enjoyment. In the growth of imaginative sympathy there is an outward spiralling that promotes participation in a natural wholeness. If Bachelard is correct and "The world wants to see itself’, then, since we are part of cosmic reality, to delight in our experience of nature, is to enter into our heritage.

It was his capacity to delight in every detail of the natural world that won me to a lifelong affinity for the writings of Henry David Thoreau. He saw meaning and purpose for human life in all natural phenomena. If ever a man found ". . tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything, "’ it was Thoreau. It was in 1938 that I discovered his Walden or Life in the Woods, in a new paperback edition of the Penguin classics, and from that first reading entered into an ante-room to a wholly acceptable paradise. Through Thoreau I not only developed an awareness of my own ignorance of the natural world I inhabited, but laid the foundations of a much later conservation ethic. Through Thoreau | reached out to ancient Hindu and Buddhist teachings, and at another extreme, acquired a deeper respect for manual labour and the skills of craftsmen. Fifty years on I still read Walden (as I still listen to Sibelius), recently re-read Thoreau’s first unsuccessful book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, but most of all continue to turn to the voluminous Journals which were his life's work. In a hut he built himself by Walden Pond just out of Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau spent over two seminal years studying nature,

reading and writing in a woodland solitude. In the nineteenth century his work was regarded almost entirely simply as nature writing, but today, as social and political critic, as an ecologist before his time, mystic, literary stylist and original philosopher, Thoreau is the subject of scholarly study in all civilised lands, and a loved companion to thousands of people. Last year, in gratitude for a youthful discovery that fifty years have so amply confirmed, I visited Concord and walked out to Walden Pond. Prepared to find a shrine desecrated | was pleasantly surprised to discover powerful on-going battles to protect the Pond in its woodland reserve, and to fight encroaching urban pressures from Boston. And although the old Indian trail around the Pond suffers from the passage of thousands of tourists each summer, I found the deep clear green of the waters that Thoreau praised seemingly as pure as ever. Spring-fed, with no inflowing or outflowing streams, the little lake, a mile long, perhaps three-quarters wide, still keeps the purity of Thoreau's youthful spirit. I walked to the Pond at six o’clock one morning and was able to sit quietly by the hut site in the green oak wood before anyone else arrived. The original hut was moved soon after Thoreau vacated it. Today a plaque on the site reads,

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thoreau’s Walden woods are no Westland wilderness, but out of his teaching and those of like minds, has grown a whole changed awareness of how humanity does, and should, relate to nature, not only easily to a tamed backyard nature, but to those vast and challenging wilds that may appal and yet still be a source of spiritual strength. "In Wildness,"’ wrote Thoreau with prophetic insight, "is the preservation of the World." The old Chinese hermit-poets of the Tang Dynasty would have understood perfectly what he meant. As Chia Tao has it, in Searching for the Hermit in Vain, "I asked the boy beneath the pines. He said, "The master’s gone alone Herb-picking somewhere on the mount, Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown." Peter Hooper is a Forest and Bird member and fulltime writer. He last wrote an essay for Forest & Bird in February 1986 about the establishment of the Conservation Department.